Monthly Archives: February 2013

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Silent Running

28 Comments

The stupid movie is appropriately dissed by Lileks:

The entire movie is nonsense, a green paen to the inevitable dystopia and the spiritual purity of those who shove seeds in loam. I remember thinking it was incredibly Deep at the time, because it summed up everything we expected from our future: a planet without trees, choked by pollution, ruled by brand names (AMF was stamped on the futuristic pool table, if I recall) but still cool because it had spaceships. This fleet held the last few trees and plants, which had been parked in orbit around Saturn – makes sense – and when the order came to destroy the last trees and return the ships to commercial use, because well you know tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Bruce Dern kills the guys he works with because they don’t have sufficient social consciousness, and saves the trees while Joan Baez sings in the background.

A YouTube comment:

I often cry when I hear this. I used to cry because of how beautiful it was and my fears of what might be. Now I cry because I see, despite it’s warning, what has become.

How true. The planet has no more trees, but we have fleets of manned spacecraft capable of reaching Saturn.

It is amazing that people take such nonsense seriously.

Anyway, read the whole thing for some evocative high-school nostalgia.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Asteroid Missions

22 Comments

Are they really harder than landing on Mars?

Sorry, but with all respect, that’s nuts. We know all we need to know about asteroids to plan a mission to them, including the space radiation environment. All you need to do is pick one. And landing on Mars is hard.

That’s not to say that I think that NASA should be doing an asteroid mission, of course. And especially it shouldn’t as long as it continues to spread the nonsense that it needs the SLS/Orion for it.

[Update a while later]

I think that this is mostly FUD from people who don’t want to do an asteroid mission.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Left Still Loves Guns

2 Comments

But they only want guns capable of killing large numbers of people quickly in the hands of the state:

Leftists are by nature not liberals, no matter what label they have adopted. Scratch a liberal, and find a Fascist.

Except the latter “liberal” needs appropriate scare quotes. Funny thing, I don’t know of any corporation or individual who murdered people by the millions in the last century.

Meanwhile, newsflash for Piers Morgan: the AR-15 is today’s musket.

[Update a while later]

Extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds:

Lefties are fond of lecturing (and writing books, and plays, and movies) about the famously dark days of McCarthyism, where right wing Bircher paranoiacs supposedly were looking for a ‘Red under every bed.’ I suppose to a certain extent they had a point, but the sum total impact of that brief 50’s reign of terror seems to be that a couple of Hollywood writers lost screenplay deals.

Contrast that with our new age of left wing paranoia. Now that the national boogie men are Gunnies rather than Commies, there ain’t no bed, or closet, or playground safe to hide from our brave safety crusaders. No one is above suspicion, and so holy is their cause that even crayon-scrawled representations of Demon Gun must be banned. Obviously, we have to arrest children precisely because it’s For The Children. Welcome to New Salem, with the Reverend Piers Morgan as our new Cotton Mather.

It’s no coincidence that the heart of Leftism is in Massachusetts. They’re the direct descendants of the Puritans, who came seeking religious freedom for themselves, including the freedom to restrict others’ freedom.

[Bumped]

General, Technology and Society

A Great Deal At Amazon

1 Comment

Get this Bosch router table, today only at this price. I bought a table from Rockler a couple months ago to build some new doors for our kitchen cabinets, but I did get a Bosch combo router that’s been great (I’ve been using the plunge base to mortise the holes for the hidden-hinge cups), and if I’d seen a deal like this on a Bosch table, I’d have gotten it instead. I don’t know how I’ve lived without them.

[Update a while later]

Here’s an unhelpful review.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Karl Rove

23 Comments

…is no conservative. Well, duh. Neither is George W. Bush (or his father).

One point he missed — Bush’s flouting of the Constitution in signing McCain-Feingold while declaring it unconstitutional. The House should have threatened him (appropriately) with impeachment for that. It was a blatant violation of his oath of office.

If you have a half an hour, you might also want to listen to Mark Levin’s righteous rant on this topic.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Coming War

3 Comments

…in the Middle East:

We can envision, then, a sectarian war raging across the whole of the Fertile Crescent, drawing in all the former territories of Turkish Arabia. The prospect will be a frightening one for the region’s major powers. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia could one day find chaos rather than functioning states on their permeable borders. If Al Qaeda/Nusrah can establish a base in Jordan, Saudi Arabia will find itself threatened by Al Qaeda franchises on both north and south that will be well-positioned to resume the pursuit of Al Qaeda’s core goal of toppling the Saudi monarchy and “liberating” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The Saudis showed great resiliency in defeating a serious Al Qaeda insurrection in 2004-2008, but that was a strictly internal threat that lacked a real foreign base. Simultaneous Al Qaeda bases in Jordan and Yemen would pose a more serious, if not an existential, threat to Saudi rule. If watching the fall or near-fall of half a dozen regimes in the Arab Spring has taught us anything, it should be that the Arab states that appeared serenely stable to outsiders for the past half century were more brittle than we have understood. The implosion of Turkish Arabia would test those regimes to the limit, and we cannot assume that the rulers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait would be any better equipped to defeat the potential challenge than Muammar Qaddhafi and Bashar al-Assad were.

The rulers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran are surely not blind to this nightmare scenario. As the situation in Turkish Arabia continues to unravel, those regional powers will be compelled to become ever deeper involved in an attempt to keep the tide of war from breaking on their own lands. This conflict could very well touch us all, perhaps becoming an engine of jihad that spews forth attackers bent on bombing western embassies and cities or disrupting Persian Gulf oil markets long before the fire burns out.

Arabia has always had bloody borders. At some point, it will become logically impossible for even the most virulent anti-semite to blame this on Israel. Not that it will stop them, of course.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Leftist Barack Obama

13 Comments

…unmasked.

The notion that he was ever a moderate was always lunacy, but he fooled a lot of the rubes, like Warren Buffett and David Brooks (not to mention Christopher Buckley, Peggy Noonan, et al) over the past five years.

[Update a while later]

Bad link, sorry.

For those who wonder why I occasionally have bad links, what happens is that I highlight the new link, but forget to ctrl-C, so the previous post’s link gets pasted, and I don’t notice.

If you want to attribute it to a senior moment, have at it.